Dawkins argues for gene selectionism, against(?) gene determinism.

I wasn't intening to make notes on my first pass through this book but feel compelled to do so, I'm pretty confident that I don't have this right, and perhaps will understand Dawkins better on the next read, but for future reference (should I ever get to the second pass) I am noting here how this looks to me right now.

Curiously the two terms in the title of this chapter do not appear in the glossary. This is what I think he means by these terms.

By genetic determinism Dawkins seems to mean the idea that behaviour (in general, or of some specific kinds) is completely determined by genes.

By gene selectionism he seems to mean the idea that adaptations which have been evolved by natural selection must have a genetic basis. This he seems to treat almost as if it were a tautology, as if it were built into the definition of adaptation, but it doesn't seem to be.

Now I have read some of Gould, and I am under the impression that Gould means something completely different by genetic determinism, the kind of thing that his essay on Canning's left buttock was arguing against. Furthermore, from reading this chapter I have a sense of why someone might consider Dawkins, depsite his protestations, a "genetic determinist" in stronger ways than he seems to acknowledge.

I am not sure that he called it "genetic determinism" but here is a kind of determinism which I understand Gould to have been arguing, for example in his essay on Canning's left buttock Gould91.

The idea is that the characteristic of species are completely determined by the effects of evolution by natural selection. Gould's belief is that there is a significant admixture of sheer chance, so that life might have been different for really quite absurd reasons. This sounds like an application of chaos theory.

Given the great distance between Dawkins's definition of genetic determinism and anything which I recall from my readings of Gould, one must also consider the possibility that others who have criticised Dawkins as a genetic determinist have also had in mind a concept widely different from the one which he has defined. From reading his own story about interchanges at conferences it seems to me entirely possible that some of his detractors might mean by "genetic determinism" just what Dawkins defines as "gene selectionism".

This is because Dawkins seems to take it as obvious that any adaptation which has evolved by natural selection must have a genetic basis, and seems to regard it important to call a spade a spade. So when others talk about adaptations without referring to genes, keeping an open mind about the adaptation has a genetic or perhaps a cultural basis, Dawkins will enter into the discussion and talk about the evolution in terms of the action of natural selection on genes. He thinks he is doing no more than makeing explicit what was implicit in their talk, but they think he is indulging in a prejudice about how the characteristic is transmitted (which they might possibly call "genetic determinism").

Dawkins has an argument by which he supports the idea that adaptations always have a genetic basis. It is along the lines that it always will be possible to find some genetic variation (not necessarily one which has survived in the gene pool but one which can be found in previous stages of evolution) which makes the behaviour under consideration impossible. If you go back far enough you come to bacteria and there probably are no behaviours of mammals which can be exhibited by bacteria. Once you have found this disabling genetic variation, then its inverse variation must qualify as a genetic basis (if perhaps a redundant one) for the behaviour.

I don't know if this is the basis for Dawkins apparent belief in gene selectionism, but it does seem to me to be fallacious. For a genetic variation to consititute the genetic basis for some behaviour trait I think one would need stronger conditions to obtain. It is the case that all behaviours have a genetic basis in the sense of their being some conditions on the genetic structure which are prerequisite for that behaviour. But the evolution of the behaviour might take place much later than the evolution of its minimal genetic prerequisites, so that evolution would not properly be described as resulting from the effects of natural selection on the propagation of genes. The best explanation might be in terms of the effects of natural selection on behaviour patterns taught by parents to their children.